There is a fairly common attitude among Eurocrats that a good crisis should not go to waste. And the ideal solution to a crisis is to move toward an “ever closer union,” that is, to push the European Union toward a superstate by hook or by crook. But if the main argument of Stefan Auer’s European Disunion is right, many of the problems the EU experiences at the moment are actually caused by such an elitist current that does not take into account some of the major forces within differing member states.
Auer teaches at the University of Hong Kong and is the author of a respected monograph on liberal nationalism in Central Europe.[1] Right from the start of his new book, he points out how seductive the European experiment has been both for politicians and scholars of the project with its cosmopolitan supranational goal. Yet this political end has had dire consequences. Technocracy has dominated the supranational project and taken on a life of its own beyond the control of those it was meant to serve.
Moreover, “Enthused by the idea of Europe’s experimental union,” he adds, “many scholars jettisoned impartiality, downplaying the growing disquiet of those who felt disenfranchised.” Auer claims, along the lines of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, that “[his] book builds on the contradistinction between nationalist and imperialist projects.” He thus blames the populist reaction of a number of national parties on the overbearing operations of the Eurocrats. As such, he has his criticisms of the concept of “pooled sovereignty” at the base of the EU on the one hand, as well as of Zielonka’s notion of Europe as a sort of post-modern “neo-medieval empire” on the other.[2]
According to Auer, the problem with the EU’s philosophically post-sovereign polity is that it actually led to the decline of democracy at the national level without enhancing it at the supranational level. This relates to a paradox with deep origins and continuing relevance: “Europe is shaped by the ongoing tensions between two tendencies,” he claims, “efforts to maintain the independence of participating member states on the one hand, and the striving for a truly united, transnational polity on the other.” The latter vector was defended early on by the first president of the European Commission, Walter Hallstein, for whom what was to become the EU was a transnational project. He was attracted to the concept of “spillover,” which explains the attraction to the “ever-closer union” that would lead to the empowerment of “supranational institutions at the expense smaller governing units, including nation states.” Hallerstein was opposed by French president Charles de Gaulle, an early supporter of the “Europe of nation states,” who criticized the Commission in 1965 as “a technocracy, for the most part foreign, destined to infringe upon France’s democracy.” But this struggle, as Auer demonstrates, continues to this day with Polish prime minister Mateusz Mazowiecki recently echoing de Gaulle’s complaint.
But the battlefield has changed. Hallstein was instrumental in transferring the field of struggle from the Commission to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) through his conception of the “majesty of law.” And the integrationist agenda thrives in the ECJ (a court that avoids democratic control, it should be added). In 2021, for example, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal questioned the principle of the court’s supremacy over the nation’s constitution by claiming some of its decisions countered a number of articles of the European Treaties. Auer notes that this is an old struggle: the German Federal Constitutional Court already issued the same complaints against the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. The German court claimed that the European Union “is ultimately derived from democratically constituted member states, which in turn embody the sovereign wills of the peoples of Europe. (. . .) In sum, the EU is not a state, and should not become one.” This decision was criticized by a number of pro-integrationists. Auer argues that it is primarily this tension that leads to the growth of populism in Europe.
The chapter on the “new member states,” that is, on Central Europe, is quite insightful. The author quotes Polish intellectual Marcin Król’s warning in the decade following the liberation from Communism:
Whoever represents a dualist vision of the world which is dominated either by liberalism, or nationalism is not only wrong about political realities, but causes irreparable damage, because the chances of implementing the liberal democratic project are decreased in direct proportion to the height of the wall between liberalism and nationalism.
And a decade later, after those countries became EU members, Król defined the nature of the failure further, arguing that the liberal intelligentsia underestimated nationalism’s positive potential and made no attempt to rebuild, for example, Polish patriotism, so needed under those circumstances.
Auer astutely observes that the lessons from 1989 were quite different for Western countries such as Germany and France, and for Central European countries. He draws upon Ryszard Legutko, the Polish author of Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (2016), who complains:
The required attitude of the newly liberated nation was not that of creativity but conformity. (. . .) The more we copied and imitated, the more we were glad of ourselves. Institutions, education, customs, law, media, language, almost everything became all of a sudden imperfect copies of the originals that were in the line of progress ahead of us.
Auer notes the new member states were accused of “backsliding” in questions of rule of law. The unnoted problem was that the rule of law these countries inherited from communism was hardly ideal. Thus, it is understandable that Janez Janša, a Slovenian politician, is quite critical of EU governance from such a perspective:
Nothing has significantly changed since the Communist system. The Left is totally dominating the judiciary—the same families as in the past: people who violated human rights, the people who sent us to prison in Communist times. They are still operating in our judicial system. But when we try to make some democratic reforms, we are accused of interfering in the independence of the judiciary.[3]
It is also worth exploring an element of the liberation of the Central European countries from their totalitarian past that Auer omits. In his study of so-called civilizational states, Christopher Coker makes the claim that Europe is a post-Christian civilization. But Coker also notes that part of Europe still draws on its Christian heritage and poses the question of whether it is not the case that the countries from Central Europe are usually less liberal – as he puts it – because of their experience with communism.[4] For Marek Cichocki, a Polish political philosopher, the answer to this question is obvious. Through more than half a century of experience with communism, Christianity was a beacon of meaning to those populations. The experience of Christian revelation meant that “[a] person’s freedom and truth of his/her life can never be the product of some ideology or even one political or economic project.”[5] And this is the lesson concerning truth and freedom that the conflict with communism imparted upon these nations but was also never profoundly experienced by western societies.
Joseph Weiler—an Orthodox Jew himself—coined the term Christophobia for the negative attitude of European elites to their Christian heritage. In an interview given to a Catholic journal in Poland in 2011, he insists that Polish politicians have the responsibility to remind other European politicians of the Christian heritage of the continent because “the European Union cannot be an ethical community if it loses its memory of what was good and what was bad. A new Europe that has lost its memory cannot be taken seriously.”[6] Unfortunately, that memory is on the wane even in the post-communist countries and at times has difficulty breaking through the fairly common assumption among post-Christian elites that religion does more harm than good.[7]
Finally, it is worth noting that Auer’s book was published shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, meaning that it was written and edited before that event. Fortunately for the current reader, an author’s note, placed after the conclusion, was added pertaining to the invasion. Auer argues that the invasion was hardly surprising for experts, except for its scale. It is noteworthy that the book contains a chapter on the return of geopolitics in the EU in which the preliminary invasion and occupation of Crimea in 2014 is dealt with in depth. The chapter, of course, takes on an added weight as a result of the current invasion. Auer points out that while the European Union did participate in some of the events preceding that first Russian aggression as a normative power, its essentially apolitical approach backfired, “triggering bloody conflict and unwittingly encouraging Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions.”
In the pithy author’s note, written a month after the outbreak of the radically more aggressive new phase of the war, Auer expresses his surprise at the apparent unity and speed with which the EU has now responded. Especially since there was a mixed response before its outbreak. Most notably France and Germany felt European security was dependent on maintaining relations with Russia, not to mention the horrendous German reliance on Russian gas.[8] One cannot help but think of John Lough’s “Germany’s Russia problem”. Auer likewise wonders whether EU institutions “can afford ongoing confrontation with Poland over its judicial reforms at the same time as Poland is playing a leading role in assisting its neighbor’s fight for survival.” He also questions how long this sense of unity can last. That is indeed a seminal question, considering the EU institutions have not given up their bullying of Poland despite the war. Moreover, despite German promises to increase spending on a military buildup, for a considerable time, there has been little substantive improvement.[9] Auer concludes with a stirring, extremely pertinent wakeup call:
The return of war to Europe will further intensify the contest between technocratic “rule of rules” and the “politics of emergency,” both of which have eroded democracy in Europe and reduced the ability of its sovereign nations to act. Whether Europe’s post-heroical and post-political societies will prove capable of overcoming their limitations will impact decisively not only on the future of Ukraine and Russia, but on the Western world as we know it. A rules-based international order can only be restored when democratic nations prove able and willing to fight for it. Is this asking too much?
European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency
By Stefan Auer
London: Hurst & Company, 2022; 288pp
Notes:
[1] Stefan Auer, Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2004).
[2] Cf. Jan Zielonka, Counter-Revolution: Liberal Europe in Retreat (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018)
[3] Janez Janša, “The political processes in Europe turned away from democracy,” interview by Ferenz Almassy, Visegrad Post, October 6, 2022, <https://visegradpost.com/en/2022/10/06/janez-jansa-the-political-processes-in-europe-turned-away-from-democracy/>
[4] Christopher Coker, The Rise of the Civilizational State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 31-38.
[5] Marek Cichocki, Walka o Świat (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 2022), 160.
[6] Joseph Weiler, “Przedmurze chrześcijaństwa,” interview by Andrzej Godlewski, Gość Niedzielny, June 5, 2011, 28.
[7] See Rupert Shortt, Does Religion Do More Harm Than Good? (London: SPCK, 2019).
[8] See, for instance, Paul Krugman, “How Germany Became Putin’s Enabler,” The New York Times, April 7, 2022, <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/opinion/germany-russia-ukraine-energy.html>
[9] See Matthew Karnitschnig, “The truth about Germany’s defense policy shift,” Politico, February 27, 2023, <https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-zeitenwende-defense-spending-nato-gdp-target-scholz-ukraine-war-russia/>
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